It matters in the same way that understanding why a plane crashed matters. If you can't figure out why a plane crashed then you can't improve flight safety much.

This is a helpful apolitical perspective. We need to improve social safety. But the pandemic is different in scope. It's not that the plane crashed. Rather, our technology "may have" allowed us to accidentally make a pandemic. It's as if no plane crash had ever occurred before, and now we made one happen. If we understand what really happened, we might see this event as bringing us into a new era in our evolution. The fact that we can imagine this to be the case even while firmly denying it to be what happened it's a firm sign that the times have changed.

I'm curious if you would expand on your last two sentences. They sound interesting but I don't quite grasp it.

That’s because it’s a mechanical device owned by a single large international company.

You can’t “engineer away” a virus.

The airplane analogy only makes sense of you say the result of investigation is to apply international sanctions against countries who continue to manufacture unsafe aircraft and fly them domestically…

…but, you have a) arguably no business telling them what to do in their own country and b) how are you even going to know, since those aircraft never visit your country?

Ie. yeah, great concept, but it’s so disparate from what we’re actually talking about it’s meaningless in this context.

It won’t fix things, or make things better knowing where it came from.

The only wins will be ideological.

>You can’t “engineer away” a virus.

If the virus is caused by risky research, you can stop doing risky research.

>arguably no business telling them what to do in their own country

Aren't there international standards for dealing with viruses? Also, some of the research in the Wuhan lab was funded by the US. So the US did have business telling them what to do in some cases regardless of international standards.

The genie is out of that bottle - the research has been done, and can be replicated by less honest actors. Under these circumstances, continuing this kind of research to understand how to combat viruses created by rouge actors might be the right thing to do.

By figuring out how it leaked, you can fix gaps in lab safety processes.

We have always been at war with Eurasia

*Eastasia.

I'm crushed that it is too late to ninja edit my comment